Who remembers MONDO 2000? Not to worry if you don’t, because although it was a groundbreaking techno-culture magazine, it ran from 1984 to 1998, i.e. pre-WIRED. But now, you get the chance to live it (or re-live it), because magazine editor Ken Goffman (aka R.U. Sirius) is using crowdfunding platform Kickstarter to aggregate the best stories from the MONDO 2000 scene and post them online for all to enjoy. The MONDO 2000: An Open Source History project will be a collaboratively-edited online history of the magazine, as told through text, audio, images, and video by those who participated in it. Oh, and for a mere $750, they’ll even write you into the history.

“At the end of the process, estimated to take approximately two years, a collaboratively-edited electronic document will be released on the web,” writes Goffman. “A more closely-edited print book composed of selections from this process…will be published. Finally, the video footage might be rolled into a Mondo 2000 film documentary.” A ‘mondo’ project indeed, but MONDO’s history is apparently rich with ingredients. Goffman describes “Mondo 2000’s history [as] an exhilarating and weird tale of early digital culture, drugs, sex, surrealism, gonzo anthropology, death, digital culture, media hype, conspiracy paranoia, celebrities, transhumanism, irresponsible journalism, appropriation, hackers, pranks, theft, fun and desktop publishing. This mostly true article from the SF Weekly tells only part of the story.” We can only hope that retro-futuristically, Smart Mobs will achieve such great heights.

The first round of Kickstarter fundraising ended on the 4th of July, which turned out to be the only round necessary: the project exceeded it’s $7,500 goal, raising $11,998 from 235 ‘backers.’ Stay tuned for the online history, book, and documentary.

And thanks to John Cog for the tip!

An email I received this morning announced a Location-Based Marketing Summit to be held in New York City September 29-30. This hot smart mobby segment of marketing, media, entertainment and commerce has generated the colorful names and logos show here, representing some of the event’s presenters. Is there a future Google, Amazon, or Apple among them? I remember in the early 1990s when Adobe had no more than a small booth at a short expo in the New York Hilton. Will LBMS be as big as postscript? It is certainly a fundamental player in the smarts of a mob.

Drop by Best & Brightest: Carnival #228 to look around where the mobile action is. Hosted by Carnival of the Mobilists masked Ringmaster Peggy Anne Satz, this blog-post review parades the best mobile blogging every week. Twittered calls for posts have expanded the Carnival’s reach. By reading the Carnival you can keep up with very hot news in mobile. By contributing your own posts you can help drive the agenda of the mobile industry.

This O’Reilly’s Books & Videos page is a something of a primer for what is going on at the edge of ebooking. In the copy there designed to sell the company’s offerings, a lot is explained about the options in this exploding new venue.

The page caught my eye in O’Reilly’s newsletter headline that included “1500 DRM-Free Ebooks. . . . four DRM-free file formats — PDF, .epub, Kindle-compatible .mobi, and Android .apk — that you can use on the devices of your choice.”

It is interesting to see DRM perhaps dancing away. Can truly open be far behind?

Law enforcement officials have long used phone records and, more recently, e-mails and text messages to help solve crimes. Now a field of forensic study is emerging that deals with iPhones specifically, targeting GPS data, browser history and other potentially incriminating information.

Textually.org points to USA Today and a new field of forensic study for iPhones

The personal computer and the web were both inspired by visions of technologies that could “augment human intellect” in the words of pioneer Doug Engelbart. From the beginning, these tools were envisioned as both personal and social, enabling individuals and groups to think, communicate, and collaborate more effectively. This workshop begins with a look at the early visions of Vannevar Bush, JCR Licklider, and Doug Engelbart (with a nod to little-known pioneers like Paul Otelet who preceded these visionaries). We then proceed to examine and try our hand at social bookmarking and building information radars, filters, and dashboards. The use of powerful and complex contemporary tools — DEVONthink, Scrivener, and Personal Brain — are introduced in the afternoon segment.

These tools are powerful and complex. A wealth of tutorial information exists, and instructor will provide customized online how-to pages. However, participants should understand that the purpose of this workshop is to introduce these tools, not to master them. We’re going to make a rapid and high-altitude investigation that ought to get participants started — but additional hours of work will be required to master these tools and methods. Tutorial and other supplementary materials will be provided.

Before class, participants will be required to sign up for a free account on Diigo and on Netvibes and to download free versions of DEVONthink, Personal Brain and Scrivener.

Knowledge workers, students, and educators would all benefit from an introduction to this category of software and methodology of knowledge acquisition, organization, and sharing. Register through Stanford’s Media-X – we meet in Wallenberg Hall at 9 AM on July 22.

Holland police monitors Twitter searching for tweeps causing potential riots at the final soccer match tonite for the #worldcup Holland #ned - Spain #esp

seen on Twitter

Politie pakt ratdraaiers op die via Twitter oproepen rotzooi te gaan schoppen http://bit.ly/a1iSDN en http://vl.am/yh4

less than a minute ago via Twitter Digital Curator

Identity theft is a growing problem in cyber crime. Associated Press points in this article to the horrifying consequences such a mistake may have these days at a bordercrossing.

Read the case of Sylvie Nelson, executive director for the Saranac Lake Area chamber of commerce.

Customs agents sometimes order her out of her car. Twice, they handcuffed her in front of her young children. Once, agents swarmed her car and handcuffed her husband, too. Then it happens again. And again. “I can understand one missed identification,” Nelson said. “But over and over and over again?”

We better take into account such an unpleasant delay when going on vacation. Happy Holidays !!!

In a recent Newswire, The Rockefeller University describes a project in which New research shows how experience shapes the brain’s circuitry. The report includes a slideshow from which the mouse image above and neuron network below are copied.

When you think about it, some principles at work here are key phenomena in smart mobs: Input changes relationships and shifts happen when nodes are removed. As a smart mob of people interacting through cellphones experiences an event, movement will be stimulated. It is not hard to imagine the patterns in the second image here as shifting mobs superimposed on a street map.

Although this may be stretching the ideas a whisker or two, it is a useful reminder that network laws underlie much of the dynamics of smart mobbing.

Just a quick note, to bring a couple of earlier posts up to date.

Some while back, I posted here about the conversation between Leah Farrall, at one time the Australian Federal Police’s top al-Qaeda specialist, and Abu Walid al-Masri, a senior Taliban strategist currently under house arrest in Iran. I said then that I believed this kind of correspondence “across battle lines” was pretty remarkable.

At Leah’s invitation, I wrote up a short account of my own views in response to Abu Walid’s questions for Leah, and posted it on her blog, All Things Counterterrorism. Abu Walid seems to have liked my comments, and posted his own response to me, which I have worked with a native speaker to translate, and which is now posted on Zenpundit.

Interestingly, Abu Walid has turned our conversation in the direction of chivalry.

As things develop, I’ll keep you posted.